This week we have the great honor to interview Bishop John Shelby Spong. This is his second time on the Nick and Josh Podcast and his last interview was our most downloaded podcast. Perhaps we strike gold again with this interview about his latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision.
We talk about his book and his life.
Pick up the book from Amazon online here:
Spong is well off my radar, but I thought he has some interesting thought experiments. My major criticisms of his approach are that he takes no account of justice. It is all very well for a white middle-class academic to tell everyone else that the point of life is to become all that you can become – but that doesn’t help those who have no opportunities and live entirely shitty lives. It also doesn’t take account of those of us who allow people to live like this (and could do something about it but don’t) and doesn’t offer any kind of judgement.
For me, the idea that a) we’re going to meet a reckoning and b) there is an existence beyond death of good things for all those who missed out down here is an idea worth embracing. The idea that true enlightenment and spirituality is only available for those who think hard about it is not.
Great interview, guys! Spong’s new book is different from his others, but I liked it.
I disagree with the previous comment (Joe). Spong’s view is precisely about justice. It is unproductive to continue the idea of reward/punishment in afterlife as the way to compensate for injustice. That superstitious view serves to relieve those in power of their guilt and responsibility. Belief in a literal afterlife plays into the hands of those who work to maintain the injustice of the status quo by saying, “don’t worry. you’ll get yours in the next life”. In addition, the hope for a “supernatural existence” supports a wide variety of atrocities like ecological destruction, economic injustice, and suicide bombers. We should seek the “reckoning” for injustice right now, not later.
Actually I can see that point of view as well, Mike. I think we should experience justice in our lives, in the here-and-now. We should want justice for the broken right now, not at some point in the nebulous future. But I think my fall-back position is that despite my best intentions, a large percentage of the world will continue to lead needlessly painful and pointless lives. And for me, the knowledge that they’re heading into the arms of a loving God is a great comfort.
Thanks for the thoughts. I take the point that there is a long to look for God as the issuer of eternal justice, but it almost seems like this is born out of situations when God’s people needed to have an explanation for how the evil in the world could thrive. The times in the old and new testament when we see references to evil being punished are entwined with times that the good are suffering at the hands of evil. While at the same time we see that there seems to be a flippancy at what God allows or does not allow. Before they did any wrong God could hate one of a set of twins and love the other.
I think justice is something that we have to work to have played out in our lives. The heaven and hell scenarios we have created are more scare tactics and reward/punishment systems put into place (in my opinion).
Is there room for a God of Justice? I would say yes, but as Spong indicates, when we move God to an outside force then we relegate justice to something after the fact. We need to see our integration with the being of God and realize that if God is Justice, then we are players in justice.
As Bishop A. T. Robinson was a popularizer of some of the ideas of the scholars, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, in the same way I see Bishop Spong as a popularizer of some of the works of J. Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.
Hmm, AT Robinson, any reading suggestions?
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